


Despair

by ProblematicPines



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Divergence - A Tale of Two Stans, Car Accidents, Character Death, Depressing, Depression, Family Loss, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hurt, Self-Hatred, Wakes & Funerals, very little comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-16 15:29:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17552273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProblematicPines/pseuds/ProblematicPines
Summary: But Stan continued driving, streaking through the darkness along the highway, not paying any attention to the world around him.He wasn’t paying attention to the road.He wasn’t paying attention to the semi tearing down the highway towards him, horn blaring, headlights blazing into the car with such a blinding intensity Stan could have sworn it was daytime for just a second.





	Despair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pineslover123](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pineslover123/gifts).



“Fuckin’ Pa,” Stan cursed under his breath as he tore down the highway in the Stanmobile, leaving behind a nimbus of dust in his wake. “Fuckin’ Ford. Fuckin’ everyone.  _FUCK_!” The street-lights flashed by in blurs of vibrant, fiery orange, illuminating his furious scowl and furrowed brow for split seconds at a time. The car was screaming as it shot down the deserted road, tires shrieking on the tarmac as it begged him to slow down.

_Fuck the speed-limit._

Stan applied more pressure to the pedal, even though he was already going at a speed that was far above the legal limit. But he was too furious to even care; he just wanted out of that Godforsaken town as soon as possible. It was like something - or someone - was hot on his trail, pursuing him not in body, but in mind; if he drove fast enough, if he left Glass Shard Beach soon enough, then there was always the chance that they couldn’t catch up with him.

_But if they did-_

Stan forced the thought out of his mind. “No point in dwelling on them now,” he told himself, even though his hammering heart was longing for the comfort of the one person in the world that now hated his guts. “They made their choice.”

The highway was an infinite stretch out in front of the Stanmobile, an endless streak of cracked black tarmac in the ebony night. His car headlights picked out the sparse, scraggly bushes sticking out of the darkness on either side, but Stan wasn’t paying too much attention to what his surroundings looked like. For all he cared he could be driving towards his demise and it wouldn’t make any difference towards his current situation.

_“They’d love that, wouldn’t they?”_

He had said he was sorry. It had all been an accident. He hadn’t meant to ruin Ford’s machine - he was just angry and wasn’t thinking properly.

_“When does tha waste ‘a space ever think abou’ anythin’ but ‘imself?”_

Filbrick’s voice, haggard and rough and stomach-twistingly disdainful, filled Stan’s head, making focusing on the road even harder than it had been before. Stan was starting to feel like the car was too small: it was closing in on him, forcing out the air, making his heart race and his breathing to become ragged and raspy. The seatbelt was constricting him, pressing down on his torso with enough force to leave bruising that would last as long as his turmoil did.

_Slow down_

_Slow down_

_You need to slow down_

But Stan continued driving, streaking through the darkness along the highway, not paying any attention to the world around him.

He wasn’t paying attention to the road.

He wasn’t paying attention to the semi tearing down the highway towards him, horn blaring, headlights blazing into the car with such a blinding intensity Stan could have sworn it was daytime for just a second.

That’s all he had left, a second - before the Stanmobile collided with the semi with a deafening  _CRASH_.

In the spit second that followed, before the smaller car was sent hurtling off the highway into the field beside it in a tumbling cartwheel of torn metal and jagged glass, Stan felt like he was flying. He was weightless, suspended in the cold night air just above his seat, having been held in place by the seatbelt threatening to strangle him. The world was spinning; he had no idea which way was up or down, and then reality struck him with an ear-splitting blow as the wrecked car slammed into the ground, albeit upside-down.

Stan was hurled back into his seat as the world veered maddeningly around him. He knew that the car was on fire; he could smell the burning and see the flickering of reddish-gold in his peripheral. It was coming from the bonnet, where the engine was. Stan should have tried escaping the car, but in his panicked, deluded state, all he could manage to do was blindly fumble at the seatbelt still keeping him in place, streaking it with dark red blood from the cuts on his fingers where the glass had pierced him.

The windshield was totally gone, replaced by a morbidly-beautiful spiderweb of glistening cracks that glimmered silver and red in the flickering firelight. Cold night air filtered in, making his whole body shake. Stan was aware of the fire as it grew and grew and grew, engulfing more and more of the vehicle.

It reeked something awful.

Back on the highway, through his muddy, half-cognizant vision, Stan could make out the semi, headlights still blazing onto him, fracturing through the jagged cracks on the car windows in intricate spikes of light that illuminated the sheer amount of crimson soaking his clothes and skin. Stan momentarily alikened his body to some kind of sick acupuncture patient - thin shards of glass were embedded in just about every area of his torso and arms - before the fire bloomed like a huge red flower, and then the world was gone.

\--

Ford sat in the bedroom, knees tucked up to his chest, arms wrapped around his legs, rocking rigidly back and forth in the bed, totally silent and unresponsive.

He refused to acknowledge it as “his” bedroom, or “their” bedroom. It was just a bedroom now. Sure, it had the same posters on the walls that he and Stan had looked at for years, and it still had the sheets and the bedding that they had slept in for just as long (of which Stan’s was much smellier and Ford’s was much more disused), but that was all that Ford could really make out about the room. It was too dark to see anything, even though the bright summer sunlight was shining into the room, illuminating all the stains from where Stan had spilled his soda and “forgot” to clean up.

Everything had been dark for Ford, even when things were, in reality, at their brightest. He couldn’t find happiness in the beautiful summer day outside when there was nobody to enjoy it with.

 _“Ma sure picked the best day to hold the funeral,”_  was the only thought that gave Ford even the smallest feeling of satisfaction. But even that was soiled by the fact that the funeral was Stan’s, and he was going to spend a day that he should have been spending working on the Stan O’ War with his beloved brother instead mourning over while his casket was lowered into a filthy hole in the ground.

It was sickening, and Ford was afraid that he would vomit if he couldn’t manage to compose himself soon.

 _“Hopefully I puke my guts out,”_  he wished, not really acknowledging just what he was thinking. “Or I choke to death.”

At least then he would feel better knowing that he and Stan could finally be together again. If one of them was dead, then how could the other possibly go on and live their lives? Every waking moment would be a constant reminder of what they were missing, how every experience they have wouldn’t be shared by the one person who it should have been with.

And that was exactly how it was for Ford.

That night, when Filbrick had lost all composure and hurled Stan out into the street, bloody-nosed and teary-eyed with nothing but the clothes on his back and his father’s cruel taunts following him, when Stan had admitted to breaking Ford’s beloved science project in a fit of rage-

_“Ford I swear it was an accident! You’ve got to believe me!”_

When Stan had been hit by a semi on the highway leading out of town, when Stan had been hurled into a field, when the petrol in the car was ignited from the fire, when the car was reduced to a blazing, gutted wreck, with Stan trapped inside having been held down by his own seatbelt…

When the news had travelled from the scene to the authorities to the front door of Pines’ Pawns, and when Ford had been sat down with his parents by the police to be informed of his brother being killed in a car accident just minutes after he was kicked out of the house, having only been identified by the warped, melted licence plate of the Stanmobile, Ford’s world had been upended.

Even now, several weeks later, Ford didn’t know how he’d reacted. It was as though that one night of his life, everything between hearing the police officer’s hoarse smoker’s voice utter the words

_“Unfortunately your son Stanley has passed away in a tragic accident tonight.”_

and waking up the following morning in a bedroom that now felt like a prison cell, had been forcibly extracted from his mind, leaving behind a gaping, hollow emptiness that couldn’t be filled with any amount of explanation by his devastated parents.

All Ford knew was that it hadn’t been a good reaction, especially since his hands, previously smooth-skinned and six-fingered in their abnormal normalcy, were scuffed, bloody and raw in the following morning when he awoke, so he must have been violent.

There was no right or wrong way to perceive the death of somebody one had grown up with, especially when that somebody bore the exact same mannerisms as he did, or near enough. It was like Stanley hadn’t been the only one to have died that night - he had taken Ford with him. Not in body, but in spirit, leaving behind a hollow shell that wept uncontrollably some days and was totally mute and unresponsive on others. Regardless, Ford hadn’t taken Stan’s untimely death well at all, and he severely doubted anything ever being potent enough to make him forget about Stan, even if only for a moment.

Getting into College wouldn’t have brought Stan back.

Going on to become an internationally-recognized scientist wouldn’t bring Stan back either.

Nothing Ford could do that would better his life and mask his indescribable pain would ever be enough to bring Stan back.

He was trapped in his despair, much like how Stan had been trapped in the seat of his car as his world was engulfed in a searing, screaming inferno.

_“It’s all my fault.”_

That was one of the thoughts that Ford just couldn’t shake. No matter how much his Ma tried telling him otherwise, it was true.

If he hadn’t gotten mad at Stan, if he hadn’t been so fucking obsessed with some stupid science fair project that tore a rift between him and his brother, if he hadn’t been so unhealthily determined to put as much distance as humanly possible between himself and Stan by travelling across the country for some shitty College opportunity, then chances were Filbrick wouldn’t have gotten just as angry and threw him out of the house.

If Ford hadn’t came home, seething and red-faced and wanting blood, then Stan wouldn’t be dead. He would still be here, wallowing in guilt and self-pity after costing Ford what he perceived to be the opportunity of a lifetime. And that was all Ford wanted now.

All he wanted was for Stan to come back, just so that he could tell him that he was sorry for being such a pathetic excuse of a brother, and beg for his forgiveness.

Ford normally would have been startled by the sound of knuckles rapping softly on the wood of the bedroom door, but nothing could ever be normal for him again. What was the point of anything anymore, now that the single most important person in his life had been taken from him?

The bedroom door squeaked open, and in stepped Ma (thankfully - Ford wasn’t sure he could stomach being alone in the same room as Pa, since he blamed him for Stan’s death as much as he blamed himself for it).

It was surreal to see Ma dressed in something other than her usual skintight wine-red dress, with her silver-streaked hair done up in a bun and her face caked in cheap and messy makeup. Now, she looked like any grieving mother would: she was dressed all in black, much like Ford was himself. A thin black veil was suspended over her face, but even through the eerie netting, Ford could see her tear-filled eyes, and the tear-streaked makeup already distorting her features. She carried with her a sense of despair that just made Ford’s own even more palpable, and his stomach sank like a stone, filling the pit of his gut with a sickening, corkscrewing sensation that made his desire to vomit even stronger.

“Ya doin’ okay, baby?” Ma asked quietly. Her voice, previously boisterous and glorious, was a dry rasp from all the crying and howling she’d been doing for weeks on end. There wasn’t even a decibel of light-heartedness in her tone, instead only an all-consuming misery but ever-present compassion for one of her remaining sons.

Ford had been rocking himself to and fro on Stan’s bed, too sickened to consider leaving it for his own, but he slowly unfurled himself and scooted towards the edge of the mattress.

“Of course not,” Ma answered for him. She sat down on the bed, weighing it down with a low squeak of age-old springs. She sat close to her son, and tepidly reached out to stroke his back through the black suit he was wearing. Her touch was welcome, but Ford couldn’t gain any real emotional comfort from it; it just felt like any other hand trying to send him the message that they were sorry for his loss and that they understood his pain, when they didn’t.

Not really.

Ford knew that it was selfish to be ranking people’s despair when it came to mourning Stan’s death - he had been awfully good at selfishness lately.

“I don’t want to go to the church today, Ma,” Ford croaked out. His voice was as dead and as miserable as his mother’s. “I can’t stomach being in front of so many people. Not now. Not ever.” “I know, baby,” Ma nodded understandingly, still stroking him. She pulled him close and rested her head tiredly on his shoulder, blinking away the tears (even though they had already totaled her carefully-applied makeup). “But we have ta. We need ta give lil’ Stanley a good send-off. It’s tha leas’ we can do fer ‘im, ya know that Ford. Better than all people.”

Ford nodded his head slowly. He still wasn’t comfortable with attending a funeral service, surrounded by so many people who claimed were friends and family of Stan, but had either never really spoken with him him or Ford had no idea even existed. They were all so fucking fake.

“Can’t we push it back a day? Just one more?”

Ma, to Ford’s despair, shook her head solemnly. “Sorry, sweetie, but no. Yer father’s been puttin’ this off fer too long, and if we don’t bury Stan today, it’s unlikely we’ll get another chance.” She pressed a chaste kiss to the side of Ford’s hair, messing up his untidy hair and filling his nose with the smell of her cheap cigarettes and her lavender perfume. “Let’s go downstairs and get in tha car, eh? Everybody’s waitin’ on ya, kiddo.”

Ford still wasn’t comfortable, but he could hear the pleading in his mother’s voice, and she was the last person in the world he wanted to make any more turmoil for. So, despite his aching desire to just lie in Stan’s bed and wither away into nothing, blotting out the world and letting himself wallow in his own despair, Ford nodded in agreement.

Ma smiled a thin-lipped smile that betrayed the sad tears glistening behind her veil, and got to her feet, Ford close behind.

He just prayed that he wouldn’t have to wait too long to see Stan again.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this Fic is probably one of the saddest ones I've written so far! And what do ya know, it has to do with Pines family dynamics yet again! I'm sensing a trend.  
> Sorry about this being so gritty and sad - it was a request made by Pineslover123, and they wanted angst so I wrote angst! Probably a lot more than what they wanted, but I like to go a little overboard.
> 
> As always, kudos and comments are very much appreciated!


End file.
